Tuesday, January 10, 2012.
Santa Fe Tapas, Good And Lonely.
The football-induced high that lifted all moods through the extended weekend has crashed to an intense depression. After all the hoopla, LSU suffered a defeat last night so embarrassing that wild theories abound on why the apparently unstoppable Tigers died on the field. Everybody's walking around in a fog. It hardly needs to be said that not many people wanted to speak with me on the radio. Visits to my web site today were off by over a thousand.
I am free of this malaise because I don't give a damn about football. I'd make what to me is the obvious case that sports mania does much more harm than good to our mental health. But I'd be shouted down and attacked as a force for evil. There is entirely too much anger in the air these days.
When I went out to dinner after the radio show, St. Charles Avenue was sparsely traveled, and looked as if a hurricane were coming.
Nor were there many people at Santa Fe Tapas, an offshoot of Santa Fe on Esplanade. All of the half-dozen or so customers were at the bar, with not a soul seated in the dining room. My impulse when I run into that situation is usually to leave. But the server and manager were hospitable, and I felt I could have a normally good dinner here tonight.
The older Santa Fe is unambiguously Mexican. This place is allegedly Spanish, but that style is interrupted by Mexican specialties from the other place. The soup du jour was seafood gumbo--not something you see much in Andalusia. But the tapas list was fascinating.
I began with a margarita (same as on Esplanade, the waitress boasted) and the most offbeat tapa on the list. A cabbage roll stuffed with rice sat atop a cylinder of fava bean puree, which had the texture of caramel custard. Roasted peppers topped the stack, and pesto sauce was drizzled all around. This was served at room temperature. Not only did that open up all the unusual flavors, but because it has rained and is now getting chilly outside the dish gave temperature pleasure--an underrated quality on great eating.
Second course: crostini with wild mushrooms, Manchego cheese, and chimichurri oil. A little warm, this gave another nice effect in the eating. The meatiness of mushrooms with the fat of cheese and oil is pleasant. None of this was going very well with the margarita, and I kicked myself for not having a glass of red wine instead.
Now the best item of the night, as the server said it would be. Seared sea scallops, ideally encrusted top and bottom and bulging at the sides, topped with a kind of non-spicy pico de gallo. The meal had now crossed into the impressive stage. Whoever is the chef here is on the ball.
Then two little pancakes flavored with onions and jalapeno. A pile of home-cured salmon. That was the first misstep of the night: the salmon lacked the snap and sharpness of the well-cured gravlax it aspired to. Also here was black caviar from the same flavorless source that sushi bars buy theirs, I think. It didn't suggest the fatty richness of Louisiana caviar, but that is in season right now, so I stop short of saying it wasn't.
I finished up with the most beautiful tres leches cake I've ever seen. With tiny cubes of melon at the end of a strip of raspberry sauce, the presentation was like something you'd see at the Windsor Court. This may be the hallmark of our culinary times, for an empty restaurant with most prices in single digits to serve something like this would have been unseen twenty years ago. The overall skills of today's chef have risen flagrantly.
Santa Fe Tapas. Lee Circle Area: 1327 St Charles Ave. 504-304-9915.
